Most of what gets sold to trades as a custom website is a template with a logo swapped in and a photograph of somebody else's van. It looks fine and it ranks for nothing, because thirty other firms have the identical pages. This is built from scratch, by me, and there is no fee for building it.
01The build What you actually get.
- Ten to twenty pages, written for your trade Not one page with everything on it. A page per service you want work for, because that is how people search. Nobody types "builder", they type "loft conversion".
- Built by hand, on Astro and Cloudflare The same stack this site runs on. No WordPress, no page builder, no plugin that breaks in eight months and takes the contact form with it.
- Your phone number reachable from every screen Tappable, in the header, on every page, without scrolling. It sounds obvious. Most trade sites bury it in a footer or, worse, put it in an image.
- Hosting, updates and fixes Included and ongoing. If something breaks you tell me and I fix it. You are not raising a ticket with a company that has never met you.
02The difference Why a template cannot do this.
A template is the same pages sold to everybody in your trade. That is fine for looking tidy and useless for being found, because Google has already got thirty versions of those words and no reason to prefer yours.
The pages that actually bring work are the specific ones. Not "our services" but the page about the exact job somebody is searching for, in the town they live in, with your photographs of that job on it. No template ships with those, because they only exist for you.
There is a second problem with the page-builder sites. They are slow, and speed is not cosmetic here. See below.
03The speed Why the loading time matters more than it sounds.
Your customer is outside, on a phone, on one bar of signal, and mildly annoyed about whatever is broken. A site that takes six seconds loses a good share of them before it has said anything.
Google also uses it. Page speed feeds into rankings, so a slow site is both losing the people who arrive and arriving in front of fewer of them.
04The arrangement Who owns what, plainly.
The website is a hosted service. It runs on my infrastructure, and if you stop paying it stops serving. You are renting a working website rather than buying the code.
That is exactly why there is no build fee. The build is real work, a couple of days of it, and the reason I can give it away at the start is that the arrangement continues. Anyone offering a free custom build with no strings is either using a template or charging you somewhere you have not looked yet.
Your domain stays yours, and so does your content, your photographs and your Google Business Profile. If you leave, you keep all of that and point the domain somewhere else.
And you can buy the website itself if you want it. From three months onwards, £1,000 one-off and the code is yours, a normal Astro codebase that will run on any hosting you like. The automation cannot come with it, because the text-back and the review funnel run on licensed software I rent rather than own. The full terms are on the pricing page.
05The awkward ones Common questions.
01 How long does it take to build?
Around two weeks from the call to live, and the slow part is almost never me. It is getting photographs and details back from you. If you have your own job photos ready it goes faster.
02 Can I see it before it goes live?
Yes. You see it on a preview link and we change what you want changed before it points at your domain. Nothing goes public until you have looked at it.
03 What if I already have a website?
Then the first question is whether it needs replacing at all. If yours is decent and the problem is that enquiries go nowhere, I will say so. That is a different and cheaper conversation than a rebuild, and I would rather have it than sell you a site you did not need.
04 Do I need to write the content?
No. I write it, you correct it. You know the trade and I know how people search for it, and the bits I get wrong are always the trade bits, so read it properly before it goes live.
05 What happens to my Google rankings if you rebuild it?
Old URLs get redirected to the new ones so nothing is lost, which is the step that goes wrong most often when other people do this. If your existing site ranks for anything, tell me before we start and I will make sure those pages carry over.
The rest of what is included is here.
Send me what you have got now and I'll say honestly whether it needs replacing. Twenty minutes, and you'll get a straight answer on whether the site is the problem or whether it's what happens to the enquiries. Book a call. Tell me what's going on.